Key ResponsibilitiesTechnical & Functional Leadership
- Lead a cross-functional engineering effort to deliver aircraft performance-driven optimization features from concept to deployment.
- Design system architectures that account for Day of Ops realities, ensuring reliability and speed for dispatchers making time-critical go/no-go decisions.
- Translate mathematical models and engineering logic into maintainable, scalable software architectures.
- Define the technical roadmap, architecture, and coding standards for optimization-related systems and services.
- Conduct design and code reviews, ensuring quality, reliability, and compliance with aviation data standards.
- Partner with data, DevOps, and QA teams to establish best practices for testing, validation, and continuous delivery.
- Understand and functional requirements of the product and the ecosystem, and guide the development team to translate the requirements to design and architecture.
- Own end to end delivery of the product and services pertaining to flight plan and data services for airlines.
Software Development & Integration
- Develop backend services and APIs that operationalize performance models and optimization logic.
- Integrate with existing Jeppesen ForeFlight platforms and third-party Flight Planning Systems (FPS) to deliver end-to-end optimization workflows.
- Implement logic that accounts for ground operations constraints (e.g., turn-around times, slot management, weight & balance limits) within optimization algorithms.
- Build interfaces for ingesting, processing, and distributing aircraft-specific performance data.
- Collaborate with mobile and web developers to ensure seamless presentation that enhances, rather than disrupts, the dispatcher's situational awareness.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Act as the technical liaison between Performance Engineering and Flight Operations, ensuring software solutions align with dispatch workflows and regulatory requirements (FAA/EASA).
- Work closely with aircraft performance engineers to understand model inputs, assumptions, and expected outputs.
- Partner with product managers to translate optimization concepts into user-facing features.
- Coordinate with cloud infrastructure and data teams to ensure scalability, resilience, and security.
- Support validation and testing efforts using real-world flight, OCC, and ground operational data.
Team Leadership & Mentorship
- Lead and mentor a team of software engineers focused on performance-based optimization.
- Cultivate a team culture that values Operational Empathy—understanding the persona of the dispatcher and the pressures of the OCC environment.
- Foster a collaborative, high-performance engineering culture grounded in technical excellence and operational discipline.
- Help define and track success metrics for optimization performance and system reliability.
- Support hiring, onboarding, and professional development within the team.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
- 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 2+ years in a technical or team leadership role.
- Proven experience building and deploying cloud-native applications (AWS preferred).
- Expertise in Python for data processing and service development, and proficiency in TypeScript or JavaScript for API or integration work.
- Familiarity with modern backend frameworks (e.g., FastAPI, Flask, or Node.js/Express).
- Strong understanding of data modeling, APIs, and distributed system design.
- Experience with PostgreSQL or similar relational databases.
- Proficiency with Git and collaborative development workflows (GitHub or GitLab).
- Demonstrated ability to lead complex engineering projects from design to delivery.
- Strong understanding of airlines OCC and dispatcher user cases. Preferably working experience with the airlines ground controls, flight planning and dispatch of fleets.
Preferred Qualifications
- Prior experience working in or closely with an Airline OCC, Dispatch, or Ground Operations environment.
- Familiarity with Flight Release logic, Fuel Planning, Weight & Balance, and NOTAM/Weather integration.
- Hold an FAA Aircraft Dispatcher certificate (or international equivalent) or have significant domain knowledge of flight planning workflows.
- Experience working with or implementing optimization algorithms (e.g., route, cost, or fuel efficiency optimization).
- Experience developing data pipelines or integrating with systems that process high-frequency operational data.
- Understanding of CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and cloud orchestration tools (e.g., Terraform, CloudFormation, or AWS CDK).
- Familiarity with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (ECS or Kubernetes).
- Knowledge of API design principles (REST, GraphQL) and versioning best practices.
- Strong communication and leadership skills, with the ability to translate engineering concepts for operational, technical, and non-technical audiences.
- Experience collaborating with data scientists or engineers to deploy ML or algorithmic models into production.
Why You Should Join:
At Jeppesen ForeFlight, we know you want a rewarding career. To do that, you need challenging projects, a good work environment, and awesome coworkers. We believe in our employees and empower them to make a direct impact on our products and services messaging. We strive to provide employees and their loved ones with a world-class benefits experience, focused on supporting their physical, financial, and emotional wellbeing. Our benefits package includes but is not limited to the following:
- Group Medical insurance
- Group term life, personal accident, and critical illness insurance
- Gym reimbursement
- 20 days of paid vacation time
- 12 days of paid sick time
- Employee Assistance Program
